Working with Gantt Charts

What are Gantt Charts?

Gantt charts are a visual representation to plan and track the progress of a project.

They help in dedicated tracking of tasks and project milestones throughout the project lifecycle. A Project Manager utilizes a Gantt Chart as a tool for visualizing and creating a project roadmap.

I am using the JIRA roadmap tools : Timelines and Plans to create Gantt Charts for my projects.Timelines can be used to create a roadmap of JIRA issues assigned to a Team.

Plans can be used for the bigger picture to drive roadmap planning and tracking across various teams or companies.

What are they used for?

Incremental Project Task Visualization

Every project task can be monitored and displayed, including its timeline, dependencies between tasks, assignees and milestones. If your project tasks haven't been modularized yet, a Gantt Chart can help break the project down into manageable sections.

Managing Dependencies

Task blockers, such as dependencies between project tasks/subtasks i.e. issues, and project milestones, which represent project stages, can be included as either a blocking element or an associated dependency of another task or stage that is blocking progress.

Dependencies can be added in Plans feature of JIRA as well.

Project Health

You can track the progress of your project by including release dates, milestones and other key metrics in your Gantt Chart. As time is logged on tasks, adjustments can be made as the project progresses.

I am using the Plans feature in JIRA to create and track releases for my Project.

What holds significance when working with Gantt charts?

1. Break down your tasks into smaller, manageable subtasks to make the Gantt Chart clearer and easier to track.

2. Make your Gantt Chart a dynamic tool by updating it regularly. Instead of creating an elaborate Work Breakdown Structure for every item, teams can focus on agreeing to the next logical sequence of tasks (pipelining) to prioritize issues effectively. A pipeline can significantly benefit from a Gantt Chart, provided it is kept up-to-date.

3. Aim for parallel execution of tasks as long as one task is not dependent on the other.